Making marks is fundamental to our learning — an experimental and messy process through which we self-reveal and self-create. We express ideas and emotions to others, tell stories, and invoke meaning through the marks we make on paper, on land, in space, and in time. Through these and other modes and mediums of mark-making, we explore our creative range, develop our artistic voice, and come to better understand our impact on the world around us.
This workshop invites participants to investigate the relationship between movement, drawing, and writing — all forms of mark-making. We will traverse and translate across page and ground, using embodied prompts to discover new pathways of creative flow and expression. We may splatter, curve, open, close, dot, scribble, circle, stipple, cross, mirror, erase, and darken — along with many other possibilities.
Although the workshop will unfold in response to the particular group, there is a loose structure as follows:
- Opening meditation, inviting grounding and orientation
- Guided warm-up for breath and body
- Exploratory movement practice and composition (translating from movement to page, from page to movement)
- Opportunity to partner
- Opportunity to share
- Closing practice
Rachael Sharkland is a Certified Hakomi Practitioner (CHP), Certified Mind-Body Coach, mother, and artist. She offers individual and group somatic coaching sessions that combine therapeutic counseling with hands-on, creative, and practical support to cultivate agency, clarity, and balance. Rachael offers an approach that is contemplative, nourishment-based, and life-affirming. She is dedicated to embodiment as a creative and healing force on the path toward liberation and well-being for all life. More about her somatic and expressive arts coaching practice here: https://rachaelsharkland.com/
As a lifelong dancer and movement educator, Rachael brings a reverence for the body to all her endeavors. She has fallen in love with various traditions and practices, including contemporary dance and performance, improvisation, West African dance, experiential anatomy and developmental movement (e.g., Body-Mind Centering, Feldenkrais), Pilates, Qi Gong, and professional bodywork. Her performance work considers constellations of being (more than) human, exploring questions of power, identity, intimacy, wilderness, and belonging. For more, see https://rachaelsharkland.com/dance-and-performance-work.
As an entrepreneurial mother of two, Rachael has a depth of knowledge about recovering from burnout and cultivating balance. She studied ecology and landscape architecture at the graduate level and worked for over a decade designing and managing large-scale urban design projects. She firmly believes that it is within the context of our built environment and its legacies of discrimination that we must negotiate and actuate matters of human health, safety, and dignity.
Rachael is a student of wilderness and offers her practice in honor of all her teachers, ancestors, and our living earth. She was born and raised in Oakland, on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone land, and continues to call this place home.
